Laila Lalami

I am so used to having to defend and explain the Arab/Muslim world when I am in America that it always comes as a bit of a surprise to me when I am abroad to have to defend and explain America. On my first night in Italy, over a delicious dinner of home-made pasta, I was told that Americans were fat. “Like this,” my friend said and held her arms out as if she were holding a door. There was not much I could say to that. Yes, Americans are obese, and the trend is only getting worse, even as all the actresses and models are starving themselves to death.

On my second day, someone asked me why I lived in America. I can think of one very good reason; it’s called Alex. But, in any case, my friend was asking out of genuine curiosity. Why, he wanted to know, did someone like me wish to live in the deep, dark pool of ignorance that is America? (He was far too polite to put it that way, so I am paraphrasing a bit here.) We had just walked into a restaurant to have dinner. The conversation veered from Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations, the war in Iraq, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, to the consumerism of American society, Bratz dolls, and the TV show Kid Nation. “What is that?” asked another one of my dinner companions. Our friend explained, in English, “They created a town run by kids, and they divided them into groups. So one group, for example, is the aristocracy and they don’t do anything.” I don’t speak Italian, but it doesn’t take much to understand our fellow diner’s response: “è una follia totale!” I felt compelled to point out that Kid Nation was widely criticized and did not do that well in the ratings. America is a diverse nation of 300 million people. There are bound to be a few cretins who think these shows are worth making or watching.

It was very hard to argue with the image of an imperialist, consumerist, excessive America, though, and I was quiet for a while. After all, I spend a lot of time criticizing all these things myself. The restaurant was empty by now, and there was a lull in conversation as everyone contemplated America’s excesses. Then the voice of Louis Armstrong came on the stereo. “It’s Louis Armstrong,” I said, to no one in particular. He is America, too, I wanted to say. America is not just the idiocy of its TV shows and the stupidity and cupidity of its rulers, but also the brilliance of its writers, its musicians, its filmmakers, its artists.

I feel like I’ve been having this sort of conversation a lot since September 11. In Morocco, in France, in Holland, and now in Italy, I’ve been having similar experiences. There is no amount of ‘public diplomacy’ this Administration can do that can cover up its belligerence, and the corporatization of the media isn’t helping. What can I say? We need a new administration. And I don’t mean Hillary.

I will be at L’universita di Cagliari (doesn’t that sound so much better than University of Cagliari?) for a reading and discussion. Here are the details:

Monday, October 08, 2007
6 pm
Reading and Discussion
University of Cagliari
Department of Anglo-American Literature
Cagliari, Italy

The event will be in English.

I arrived at Mel Bookstore early on Friday to give myself time to explore the place before the time came for my reading there. I asked my editor why it was called ‘bookstore’ and not the Italian word for it, and the response was that many of these bookshops use that word to look more hip. Dear God, I thought, do they really think that using the American word for libreria might make people read? Anyway, as always when I am outside the U.S., I’m always startled to see what American titles are stocked by foreign bookstores. This was my first surprise: The huge stack of Walt and Mearsheimer’s new book, The Israel Lobby:

Schmaltzy best-sellers were everywhere. Here’s Io & Marley:

Of course, the bookstore had its fair share of chick-lit, in this case from Britain:

And no contemporary bookstore would be complete without burqa-lit. Look at this: The Veil of Fear, I think the title says. I’m surprised there aren’t flames rising from each letter.

It was a nice surprise when I stumbled on this huge stack of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The cover said that one million copies were in print in the U.S., which surprised me, until I remembered it was on Oprah.

Anyway, take comfort where you can find it. People in Ferrara, Italy, are reading Cormac McCarthy.

My main event here at the Festival Internazionale in Ferrara takes place this Saturday afternoon. Here are the details:

Saturday, October 6, 2007
4:30 pm
Panel on Fiction and Journalism
With Arundhati Roy, Laila Lalami, Efraim Medina Reyes, and Elif Shafak
Moderated by Goffredo Fofi
Festival Internazionale
Cinema Apollo
Ferrara, Italy

You can view the entire lineup for the festival right here. If you’re an Italian reader of my book, or my blog, or are just curious, please come by and say hello.

I am doing a reading from the Italian edition of my book (La speranza e altri sogni pericolosi) at Mel Bookstore tomorrow night. Here are the details:

Friday, October 5, 2007
6:30 pm
Mel Bookstore
Piazza Trento e Trieste
Palazzo San Crispino
Ferrara, Italy

I hope Italian readers can make it.

After a journey that took me on planes (three), trains (two), and automobiles (two), I am now in Ferrara, Italy, to attend the Festival Internazionale in Ferrara. I am staying in a converted monastery and my room is very bare, with just a bed, a desk, and a dresser. There is no internet access, and the phone doesn’t let me make outgoing calls. A large crucifix hangs on the wall above my bed. The red-tiled hallways, the old furniture, the multiple Christs on the cross everywhere remind me of the grade school I attended, which was also in a converted Catholic institution in Rabat. There are relatively few cars on the cobbled streets of the village, because most people ride bicycles. So it’s very quiet and peaceful, and I find myself thinking what a great place this would be to write a book. But I am here to talk about one: The Italian edition of my book just came out, and my publicist is starting things off with a reading here. More soon, I hope.

Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review has posted some links over the last couple of days about odds and guesses leading up to the announcement, in a week or so, of the Nobel Prize in literature. Last year, I correctly predicted that the prize would go to Orhan Pamuk, and this year I am not getting a strong feeling, but I’m still going to give it a try. I think it will go to Cormac McCarthy. You heard it here first.

I always enjoy reading Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, and he has rarely been more incisive than in this op-ed about Clarence Thomas. Here’s how it opens:

I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you caught Thomas on ” 60 Minutes” on Sunday night, you know that he will probably consider me one of the many people who want to see him “destroyed” because he doesn’t “follow in this cult-like way something that blacks are supposed to believe.” That’s what he told CBS correspondent Steve Kroft — that he’d been persecuted for “veering away from the black gospel that we’re supposed to adhere to.”

The up-close-and-personal “60 Minutes” piece, timed to coincide with publication of Thomas’s autobiography, was compelling television. It was also a useful reminder that whenever my Bush Derangement Syndrome flares up to the point where I’m actually feeling nostalgic for the days when George Bush the Elder was in the White House, I need only recall that it was Poppy who put Thomas on the court. That snaps me back to my senses. Thomas is only 59; we’ll be saddled with him, and that gigantic chip on his shoulder, for decades to come.

And the rest of the piece is equally quotable. Check it out.

First Lines is a Cornell University site that collects opening lines from many classic novels, and lets you guess which books they came from. Warning: It’s pretty addictive.

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker about the Administration’s plans for Iran. Here’s a brief excerpt:

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

Sound familiar?